The Friday Roundup – Software Updates, Rotating Objects and GIFs

Updates!

To be honest there haven’t been too many things to include this week in the Roundup except for two major releases and one in the works.

Adobe Premiere Elements 15

The first of the new releases is Adobe Premiere Element 15.

They have been pretty quiet about it so far but perhaps they are just doing a soft release ahead of a more mainstream marketing campaign later. Who knows?

Anyway I have taken a look at what they are promoting but I have yet to actually install and use it so I will save my comments for when I do.

What I can say is that Premiere Elements has been slowly sinking in my ratings for a few years now so I think that unless they get their act together on this one I may just remove it altogether from the site.

Adobe has in my opinion been exceptionally lazy with Elements over the past six years or so and although it is a perfectly workable video editor it has become nothing to write home about.

Anyhoo, when I get time and some more information I’ll update (or remove!) my review listed HERE.

*** Update!!! OK, I just downloaded the new program and installed it. I haven’t gone into it too much but I can safely say Adobe has seriously revamped this release.

It looks and behaves nothing like the old versions and so far I am just a little bit impressed!

TechSmith Camtasia 9

Camtasia is another editing program I have had on this site since I first started it and it was even on the site I had before this one.

The reason I originally included it was because at that time it was one of the only high quality screen recording software programs you could get.

Yes kids, back in the day a screen recorder was considered to be rather an exotic and rare beastie just like DVD burners on a home PC!

If we then move forward in time to about four or five years ago Camtasia started to lose that unique selling proposition.

Corel added a screen recorder then the following year CyberLink added one and I think it was that same year that Magix also added theirs.

In fact now a screen recording module is about as exotic as a peanut butter sandwich.

What really brought that point home to me was that the other day I was digging around in the features of Filmora from Wondershare looking for some setting or something.

I was shocked to find that even Filmora has a screen recorder and this is a sub $50.00 product!

So it is pretty clear that any edge Camtasia had in that field has been well and truly buried.

So while all this has been going on TechSmith have been trying to develop Camtasia as a fully loaded video editor as well.

This is similar to Nero evolving into a full Multimedia suite because their core feature, optical disc handling, has become something you don’t need specialized software for anymore.

So how have TechSmith fared with Camtasia 9?

Well all round I think we can safely say the result has been pretty ordinary unless you are going to be producing a very specific type of video in quantity.

First up let’s just take a look at the price.

Regardless of whether you want the Mac or the PC version, the software comes in at U.S. $199.00.

An upgrade from an existing license will set you back U.S.$99.00

So that puts Camtasia way above the very top level versions of CyberLink PowerDirector, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Pinnacle Studio, Vegas Movie Studio and just about any other comparable program.

So you would really have to ask yourself why would you pay that?

What does Camtasia offer that the others don’t?

Unfortunately the answer to that is that Camtasia actually offers less than the others… and by a long way!

It does not connect to devices that are connected to the computer like a camera or camcorder.

If you want to directly pull in footage from a mobile device you have to install a separate App to do that.

It comes with almost no filters and effects and absolutely zero correction tools for color or dodgy footage.

It has 30 transitions compared to the hundreds in other programs and to top it all off it does not allow you to produce CDs DVD or Blu-ray discs.

So when you look at Camtasia 9 at around $200.00 and Wondershare Filmora at under $50.00 offering basically the exact same features you have to begin wondering exactly who this software is aimed at.

And that is where we get to the real crux of the matter.

Camtasia is definitely not a video editing software solution for the amateur movie maker or the budding pro.

The real market for this software is most likely someone who would never come to this site in the first place.

Camtasia has reinvented itself in a way specifically aimed at a commercial application for producing high quality video for promotions, demonstrations, presentations and “How to’s” and all for online distribution.

For that purpose it excels but for my purposes in producing videos… not so much.

Filmora Coming Soon!

There was a chance that Filmora were going to come up with a major update this week but that has been put back for a while now.

I guess they probably ran into a few issues they needed to get sorted before releasing.

I have had a sneak preview of it and they have added a few things I am not allowed to talk about until the release but the good news is that they haven’t added any complication at all so that’s a relief!

More on that when they make the announcement.

How to Make a GIF

Ok so the other day I was messing about with some timelapse images I had downloaded from the local weather site showing a typhoon near where I live.

I thought it would be cool to make a GIF of the progress of it for my friends to see.

So, I lined up the images in quite a few editing programs who shall remain nameless, set the duration of each image, adjusted the size to it was suitable for online sharing and then selected Export or Share.

Sounds pretty straightforward so far right?

It was only at that point that I noticed in many of the programs I have (and there are many!) none of them could actually output to GIF!

I could output all sorts of exotic and bizarre formats at outrageous parameters but a simple little GIF? Nope!

Stupidly the one program I ignored because obviously making a GIF would be something beyond its technical abilities, was Filmora.

I say stupidly because I had already that day stumbled upon the screen recorder in Filmora so I guess I should have known.

Then all of a sudden the video below popped into my news feed!

Rotate Objects in CyberLink PowerDirector 15 Ultimate

This is a quick and simple introduction to rotating images in PowerDirector 15.

Like most of these videos I post, the basic concepts for completing these task are almost the same in a wide range of video editing software programs.

Often the only difference is in perhaps the terminology or how you access the module that handles that particular task.